While Su Hwang calls herself a "late bloomer" when it comes to writing poetry, she has made quite a name for herself since becoming a poet. She received the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in poetry, the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, the inaugural Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature, and was a finalist for the 2021 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
However, Su doesn't limit her work to just her own poetry, she also uses her writing skills to help amplify underrepresented voices through organizations such as Poetry Asylum and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
How
did you get started in poetry? Were you always a writer?
I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but I struggled with it for most
of my life. A late bloomer to poetry, I published my first poem
after graduate school when I was about forty-one years old, then my
debut collection Bodega
at forty-five. Growing up, people said writing was in my blood, but
I suffered from long bouts of self-doubt and nursed a debilitating
fear of failure. I had some enormous shoes to fill. My paternal
grandfather, Hwang Sun-won (1915-2000), was a renowned literary
figure in Korea, whose career spanned nearly sixty years and
encompassed much of Korean history after liberation from Japanese
occupation. He was this larger-than-life figure, although I barely
knew him since my family immigrated to the United States in 1982
when I was eight years old. It wasn’t until the summer of 2014, when
I visited the museum built in his honor in a small town outside of
Seoul, that I got to fully understand the depth and breadth of his
work. Sonagi Village is named after his most beloved short story,
which translates to “Rain Shower.” In addition, my uncle is a poet
and scholar, and my father, before coming to America, was a
journalist. As proud as I am of my family’s literary legacy, I also
felt the weight of it, like I couldn’t measure up somehow.
On the other hand, I never met my maternal grandfather––he was a
casualty of the Korean War, which I allude to in my poem “The Price
of Rice.” My grandmother, her mother, and four children (including
my mother who was probably five or six years old at the time), fled
what is now North Korea and survived on scraps, living on the
streets for many years. My mother rarely speaks of this period in
her life, but I know she started working as a young child to make
ends meet, eventually becoming a school teacher. When my parents
immigrated to the U.S., first running a dry cleaner’s then a corner
store in the Queensbridge projects in NYC, their hopes for me and my
brother achieving the “American Dream” didn’t include pursuing the
life of a writer. Like many immigrant parents, they wanted us to
find stability and comfort, that elusive and false model minority
myth that plagued so many in our generation. Much to their chagrin,
I was a bit of an aimless wanderer, valuing my freedom above all
else. I worked a series of odd jobs, mostly a mix of editorial
assistant gigs to waiting tables, seesawing from NYC to San
Francisco and Oakland then back again while trying, very poorly I
might add, to write fiction because I thought writing the next great
American novel (whatever that means) meant being a legitimate
writer. There was a lot of hemming and hawing on my end, with a ton
of half-baked ideas that went nowhere.
I often joke that poetry found me because of rage and jealousy: I
was in my mid-thirties and living in Oakland when a guy I’d been
casually dating confessed that he was still in love with his ex who
happened to be a poet. The part that shocked me wasn’t the breakup,
but that a woman of color could be an actual living poet! Later,
when I read some of her poems online, the thought that raced through
my mind was: I could do this. That’s not to sound pejorative, she’s
super talented, but in that moment, something just clicked. In a
strange way, her voice offered me permission to work through my own
fears, like I was out of excuses. The next day, I wrote a poem about
the breakup––not so much about him, but rather my observations about
the ocean and what I was feeling. For the first time maybe ever, I
didn’t immediately hate what I wrote. More poems followed.
Soon I realized I needed to teach myself the craft of poetry. When I
googled “how to write poetry,” The Poet’s Companion by
poets Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux landed at the top of the
search. I could tell they were solid teachers and fierce poets after
devouring the book, and it so happened that Kim lived nearby and ran
workshops out of her Oakland home. I emailed her and she responded
that someone had dropped out at the last minute and there was an
opening that weekend. From that serendipitous experience, I worked
up the nerve to apply to a bunch of MFA programs in poetry, a Hail
Mary of sorts. As luck would have it, I was accepted into the
University of Minnesota, and at the age of thirty-eight, I packed up
my jalopy with my few belongings and drove to Minneapolis in the
fall of 2013. That’s how it all started. I do want to add that
getting an MFA is absolutely not essential to being a writer (in
fact, MFA programs can be detrimental and toxic to writers), it just
happened to be the long, circuitous path I took. This quote from Kim
Addonizio’s book Ordinary Genius on my website pretty much
sums up my journey:
Before wanting to be a poet I did many things: worked hateful low-paying jobs, lived in a lot of group houses, took up the flute, read, drank, took drugs, found my way in and out of friendships and love relationships. My life didn’t change once I discovered poetry. But I had found my direction. I didn’t have a great aptitude–– my early poems were truly terrible––but I had a calling at last. I realized that poetry was my gift. My ‘genius.’
What is the writing process like
for you?
Organized chaos, mostly. I wish I wrote every day, but the truth is,
my writing process is highly irregular. I often need to feel
inspired, nudged by my soul to get something down after I’ve
metabolized ideas, events, memories, and other sensory information.
To that end, I also subscribe to the notion that reading, observing,
remembering, listening, walking, pacing, researching, absorbing, and
daydreaming are all part of the writing process––writing by osmosis
as I sometimes muse. Such meanderings are essential to the way I am
in the world and it’s reflected in my writing life. I have a lot of
thoughts swirling about, but it doesn’t mean they all get expressed
onto the page; there’s a ton of tinkering. For me, revising plays a
larger role than anything else. I believe any good writing is 25%
inspiration and 75% revision, and I can be a perfectionist in this
regard. There are a handful of “gift poems” in my book that sort of
came out fully formed in one sitting, but most of the poems were
worked on for a while, in several cases, years. I liken the process
to sculpting something from a block of marble, chipping away and
whittling until the work that wants to emerge––emerges.
Most people have preconceived notions of poetry being hard
to understand and for academics. Why do you think that is and what
can be done to change that?
The poetry I was exposed to growing up was written by very dead,
very white men. I didn’t resonate with most of what was put in front
of me because they felt like labyrinthian riddles or were really
boring, so I rarely paid any attention. As a woman of color and
child of immigrants, I just didn’t believe poetry was something I
had access to. Real talk: poetry’s ivory tower reputation is a
tentacle of white supremacy. Academia in this country is an
extension of empire, and just as “history” has been taught through
the lens of the white gaze, the same applies for literature in many
respects. The white literary canon largely exists at the expense of
many women and voices of color having been diminished, co-opted, or
simply left out. I don’t think the wielding of language within these
power dynamics can be discounted. Of course, there were poets of the
Beat Generation and Black poets during and following the civil
rights movement pushing boundaries, but for the most part, poetry
has been held up to be this exclusive, elusive thing because it
reinforced the notion of hegemony created by systems of white
supremacy and patriarchy.
During my thesis presentation in the fall of 2015
for what eventually became Bodega, a 40-something white,
cishet male professor berated me in front of my all-white cohort
saying, “To use the word interrogate to talk about race is tired in
post-racial America.” This following the Ferguson protests after
Michael Brown was killed, and urgent calls from the Black Lives
Matter movement. Gaslighting by white professors is still a common
practice. I dropped him from my thesis committee the next day and
filed a complaint with the department, which of course yielded
nothing. If I were a younger student, I may have taken his criticism
to heart, but I was never good at listening to authority figures.
Gatekeeping in the publishing industry remains disproportionately
white, but things are slowly shifting, and it’s heartening to see
more and more marginalized voices in the literary world. I think the
poetry landscape is being altered right now by writers, readers,
librarians, and booksellers, and this is why contemporary poetry
excites me so much. Language evolves like everything else, and I’m
happy to see more diversity of books. Representation matters and
teaching living poets is essential. Sun Yung Shin and I of Poetry
Asylum believe poetry is a human right.
How did the idea for Poetry Asylum come about?
Poetry Asylum is a collaborative partnership with poet (writer,
educator, cultural worker, jewelry maker, healer, sister-in-arms) Sun Yung Shin.
We’re not an official organization or business, just two Gen X poets
raging against the machine. I like to tease that we’re a two-person
punk rock band without any instruments and only a smidgen of punk––a
Korean feminist poetryship, if you will. I can’t remember exactly
when or where we met, but we became fast friends since we share the
same socio-political and spiritual outlook. I consider her my soul
family. Trump being elected in 2016 really messed us up, and I think
we were both needing an outlet to express our rage and anxiety in
productive ways. That same year, Sun Yung edited the anthology A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota,
which became the Minnesota One Read book in 2020. We were fuming
about what was happening in the world and the pervasive whiteness in
the Minnesota literary scene. Poetry readings with all-white readers
or the one token person color were still a common occurrence and we
wanted to flip the script, and some tables, along the way. Combining
our skill sets, we decided to create platforms, mainly through event
planning, for marginalized voices to be made more visible in the
Twin Cities. Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve been on hiatus
to focus on our own personal projects, but we’re always open to
taking on new collaborations if and when they arise.
In what ways do you think poetry and activism can intersect?
I believe poetry and activism are inextricably linked, not mutually
exclusive. My poetry will always be political in some capacity,
explicitly or not, for as long as my body and existence are filtered
through the skewed lens of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. And
when I say “political,” I don’t mean just politics as we know it,
but rather the emphatic imperative for equity and justice for all
living beings, including ecological and spiritual considerations
because everything is interconnected. The human condition is just
one facet of existence. Therefore, activism comes in many forms, not
with a capital “A” per se, but rather in the small, quotidian ways
we shift, tussle, and transform our daily interactions,
conversations, and projections with ourselves, each other, and the
world around us. To me, activism means using intentional actions and
words to do and be better. It can be volunteering at a phone bank or
being vocal on social media or hitting the streets with signs or
changing your diet to eat less meat or having difficult
conversations with family members and friends. Activism is the
cumulative power of the small things we do every day.
Poetry is music, as well as a form of communication and deep
observation, to wrangle into language the unsayable, to offer
streams of empathy and connection, a channel between speaker and
receiver, between reality and possibility, a kind of resonance.
Poetry is the juncture at which two imaginations can meet and hold
space. Poetry helps us imagine possibilities. As many abolitionists
point out, we can’t re-imagine the world we want, because everything
is still being imagined right now. Through poetry, art, creativity,
inclusivity, and experimentation will we even get close to the
future we seek. Now more than ever, we must speak out, loudly and
boldly, and share each other’s stories. This is how we’re going to
better understand one another and create streams of empathy and
solidarity. I believe that’s the power of poetry and art––to bridge
cultures, histories, emotions, time, and space––so we can find ways
to connect and heal despite our differences.
How did you become involved with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (MPWW)?
What is the most surprising thing you have learned from your
involvement?
A few years ago, MPWW’s founder and artistic director, Jennifer
Bowen, emailed me out of the blue and asked if we could meet for
coffee––she had gotten my name from a couple of mutual writer
friends in town. One of the reasons why MPWW has grown into one of
the most successful arts-in-corrections organizations in the country
is that Jen hand-selects all the instructors and mentors. She’s one
of the most dedicated, humble, thoughtful people I know, and Jen is
meticulous about who works with our students. That said, when she
asked me if I’d be interested in teaching a class with MPWW, I
initially declined the invitation. I was losing my shit after
Trump’s election and I wasn’t sure I could handle the emotional
weight of it, and to be frank, the uncertainty of going into prisons
gave me pause. She totally understood where I was coming from, but
gently asked if I’d be willing to visit one class to meet some of
the students. I agreed and, of course, as soon as I met them, there
was no question.
As Angela Davis says, “prisons don’t disappear problems, it
disappears people.” I see our work as a way to help un-disappear
people by providing them with pathways and tools to express
themselves and dare to dream beyond bars and biases. The
incarcerated individuals I’ve had the honor and privilege to work
with are incredibly talented, resilient, courageous, and complex
artists. They are just like you and me, and I’m constantly inspired
by them. The most surprising thing I’ve learned from working with
MPWW students is that art can live and thrive anywhere if given the
chance, and art can transcend trauma. We haven’t seen our students
on the inside for over a year due to the pandemic, but I think about
them all the time. I can’t even begin to imagine what they’re going
through right now, and I hope they are hanging in there the best
they can during this unthinkable time.
Everyone was buzzing about Amanda Gorman’s poem at the
inauguration. What do you think it is about her piece that touched
so many people?
I was mesmerized, like so many of us, by Amanda Gorman and her
reading of “The Hill We Climb” at the presidential inauguration. Her
delivery and presence were masterful. She elevated poetry that day,
and continues to do so with her work, advocacy, beauty, grace, and
spirit. She was able to capture the uncertainty of the moment while
signaling hope for the future, touching so many people because she
spoke from the heart, not some egoic need to impress or prove a
point. The poem resonated because of its relatability and
accessibility. She was speaking to everyday people, not academics or
critics or to other poets. I loved that children and adults could
find something to relate to. I had several friends who aren’t poetry
readers text me after the inauguration to say how much they loved
her poem and how they were interested in reading more poetry going
forward. A win for Amanda Gorman is a win for poetry, and that’s a
win for all of us.
What inspires you the most?
So many things inspire me: nature, animals, art, architecture,
music, friendships, family, photography, movies, overheard
conversations, cloudy memories, coming across a word I’ve never
heard before, a vibe, space, astrology, tarot, occult studies, etc.
In light of everything discussed here, however, I’d say the hope for
collective liberation and abolition keeps me fired up. I’m inspired
by younger generations not accepting things at face
value––questioning outmoded racist, classist systems and
ideologically-skewed narratives. These oppressive forces will take
time and energy to dismantle, but despite all the ongoing trauma of
the relentless and violent news cycle, I have hope that our better
selves will prevail, and we will find peace––peace for all living
beings––because what is happening is unsustainable.
Is there one piece of advice you wish you had before you
started your career?
I wish I could have told my younger self to not get bogged down by
feelings of deficiency and worrying about outcomes even before
getting started. I spent so many years in self-sabotage mode.
Writing is to dance with failure because it’s inherently subjective,
so just do it, whatever form it takes. Even now with a book out in
the world, writing doesn’t get any easier. Each page is a blank
canvas, so be messy, be weird, be soft with yourself. Make mistakes.
Fuck shit up. Get rejected, it’s all part of the journey. You won’t
always please or do right by everyone, so remember to have fun and
make art for the sake of making art. And don’t forget to cultivate
and build community because bringing a book into the world is not a
solitary act, it takes a village.
